Integrated UI for Changesets

[Andarist]

I was lately wondering - what if Changesets would come with a dedicated application that would extend/enhance the standard git-based workflow.

What could be simplified by such a UI? What would you expect out of it? How the integration could work on a technical level?

Note that there is no intention now to create such UI - this is mainly “what if” thread. Its intention is to gather ideas and maybe to get a volunteer from the community who could create MVP for this.

[arcanis]

I really like the UI we have with Yarn's workflow, however I was starting to feel the terminal was becoming a limiting factor with many workspaces, since it's hard to get a good picture of all of them while also providing good interactions like scrolling / "select all" / "unselect all" / etc.

I've considered a different approach, although I didn't get time to work on it so far. I'll keep using Yarn as example, but it feels like the same could be applied to Changeset:

• Have yarn version check -i spawn a web server on a known fixed port and wait. This server would expose a single endpoint: POST /submit.

• Additionally, it'd open the browser to a known url, with a json payload in the query string. This known URL would be a React app (or whatever other framework) which would render a rich form based on the information provided in the payload.

• On submit, the app would send the data to the POST /submit endpoint, which would apply the given state in the change form and exit the yarn version check -i CLI command.

The "known" url could either be hosted on our website, or bundled with our CLI and served dynamically on localhost.

[Person-93]

Perhaps there can be a command line option to produce output in json or some other machine readable format. That way any tooling built around it can be in a separate package. This would allow @arcanis or anyone else to make their own GUI however they like it.